Home / Articles / The SaaS apocalypse will be decided by inertia, not by AI / Versions / v1.1.0
The SaaS apocalypse will be decided by inertia, not by AI: what changed in v1.1.0
From v1.0.0 (2026-09-21, ef990399a) to v1.1.0 (2026-09-21, ca1e56f88), paragraph by paragraph.
1 paragraph added, 0 removed, 3 changed in place, 46 unchanged. About 218 words added and 6 removed. Insertions are marked like this, deletions like this; unchanged runs are folded to one line; figures appear as their file names.
# WhatThe SaaS refused to buildapocalypse is exactly what the agents needoptional
Summary: The SaaS apocalypse,apocalypse has not happened yet, and the market has already declared it cancelled once. It remains a very strong possibility, argued here with data rather than vibes. Most users were never happy, most features were never used, and most licences sit idle, because success bred inertia and inertia bred lock-in. Now anybody can brief the software they actually want, and the portability, APIs and schemas that SaaS companies refused to build are precisely what an agent needs. TheWhether mistakeit ishappens to confuseany agiven briefcompany withdepends aon product.how Thethat opportunitycompany isbehaves: toNokia bewhen the companymobile thatphone keepsarrived, or Nokia when the briefiPhone running.did.
1 unchanged paragraph
It is still all to play for.for, Butand the reason it is worth writing down is that the outcome is not fixed. Nokia met the arrival of the mobile phone by becoming the mobile phone company, and dominated the category for fifteen years. Nokia met the arrival of the iPhone and was gone from the category within seven. Same company, same industry, two responses. The SaaS apocalypse is optional in exactly that sense: it is not a forecast about the technology, it is a forecast about behaviour, and every company gets to choose which Nokia it is. The ground has moved, though, and the best way to see how is a Wardley map.
45 unchanged paragraphs, under The market already had this argument once this year, First, the part nobody likes to say: users were never happy, Why it got this way, in one line from Wardley…
Which brings it back to Nokia. The apocalypse is optional. The version of it that ends with a company gone from its category is the one where it treats the screen as the moat, keeps the data locked, ships the API as a tick-box, and waits for the panic to pass, which the market has helpfully told it the panic has. The other version is the one where it notices that what it refused to build is exactly what its customers' agents are asking for, and builds it first. Both are available. Only one of them is a choice the company gets to make later.